Tim Tebow, the University of Florida quarterback, prayed with Barack Obama and a few thousand other people at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning. Did he and the President talk about that Super Bowl ad? As noted here earlier, Tebow and his mother, Pam Tebow, will be seen during the game in an anti-abortion message paid for by Focus on the Family. It is expected to tell the story of how, while pregnant and doing mission work with her husband in the Philippines, Pam Tebow became very ill, falling into a coma at one point; her doctors, she says, advised her to have an abortion, but she ignored them.
Now, to be clear, as I’ve written before, believing in choice means respecting Pam Tebow’s choice. But one can still ask her to respect the choices of others. The Tebows have presented their story as a lesson, and even as a divine message. According to an interview Tim’s father, Bob Tebow, gave Sports Illustrated, not long before Tim was conceived, Bob had been preaching “out in the mountains of Mindanao.” About what?
I was weeping over the millions of babies being [aborted] in America, and I prayed, “God, if you give me a son, if you give me Timmy, I’ll raise him to be a preacher.”
From this perspective, Tebow was born to make this ad. (On the subject of his preaching—and let’s stipulate that it’s great that Tebow spends a lot of time visiting hospitals and prisons—the Christian Science Monitor has a list of the “Top 5 Tim Tebow eye black biblical verses.”) Or was he? The Center for Reproductive Rights said, in a letter to CBS, that
Past media coverage of the Tebows suggests that the ad may present a misleading picture of the reality of abortion in the Philippines.
Abortion was completely illegal when the Tebows lived there, it seems. Pam Tebow might have had other options, like getting on a plane for her home country, where women have a right to choose. The C.R.R. writes that a thousand women died as a result of the Philippines’ abortion laws in 2008, which is a number worth remembering. Will Saletan, at Slate, has an interesting look at then dangers associated one of Pam Tebow’s ailments, placental abruption, warning against conclusions shaped by “survivor bias.”
But women’s groups on the whole have had a disjointed response to the Tebow ad, with several asking CBS not to run it. That doesn’t help. According to The Daily Beast, when asked about running a competing Super Bowl ad, Terry O’Neill, the President of the National Organization for Women, said
The fact is, if NOW had an extra $2.5 million lying around, I’d spend it on working for women’s equality…. I wouldn’t give it to CBS.
How does educating people about choice not count as working for women’s equality? If NOW and other groups had spent the couple of weeks since Tebow’s ad was announced raising money for a competing ad, and pressuring CBS to give it a spot, they might have got somewhere. It would be surprising if at least some big donors didn’t respond. Planned Parenthood has released a response, with its own football player, Sean James, who played for the Vikings (above), but it, like the Vikings, won’t be in the Super Bowl.
Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman made a similar point in a Washington Post op-ed:
Instead of trying to block or criticize the Focus on the Family ad, the pro-choice movement needs its own Super Bowl strategy. People want to be inspired, and abortion is as tough and courageous a decision as is the decision to continue a pregnancy. But the conversation is being led by Focus on the Family and its quarterback ambassador…. Women’s and choice groups responding to the Tebow ad should take a page from the Focus on the Family playbook.
That is quite reasonable, except for the “or criticize” part. One can believe in the Tebows’ right to tell their story and still be annoyed by a proselytizing Super Bowl ad, just as one can be annoyed by a startlingly tacky ad. There is no free-speech hypocrisy in complaining about dancing lizards or about cloying quarterbacks—when has anyone ever sat quietly during Super Bowl ads? People are allowed to put bad ads on television. Other people are allowed to boo.
